


Missing Number Nine: The Time War

by PlaidAdder



Series: Doctor Who Meta [4]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Episode: The Day of the Doctor, Gen, Meta, Nonfiction, Time War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-16
Updated: 2014-01-16
Packaged: 2018-01-08 23:15:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1138606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nonfiction. Post-DOTD review of what happened to the Time War backstory after Nine's season, what DOTD does to it, and why it's a problem that the show seems to be doing its best to forget Nine entirely.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Missing Number Nine: The Time War

So, after I saw “Day of the Doctor” I wrote up [this post](http://plaidadder.tumblr.com/post/68029809886/steven-the-continuity-slayer-uses-his-powers-for-good) about how, for once, Steven Moffat had done something useful with his massive and catastrophic disregard for continuity by unwriting the destruction of Gallifrey. Still missing Nine, and curious about just how much the Time War backstory migrated over the course of seven seasons, I went and rewatched “Dalek.”

First of all, let me give some props to Eccleston for this episode, which required him to do some very complicated emotional work while playing opposite a giant pepperpot. I love his first confrontation with what he (sadly mistakenly) believes is the last surviving dalek. So many emotions, so much ambivalence, so much fighting with himself just as much as with the dalek. I like how his first reaction is a transition from “I’m the Doctor, I’m here to help” to gut-churning fear. Then, once he finds out it’s broken, oh the journey we go on. His decision to electrocute the dalek at the end of that scene is shocking but not unbelievable; by that point you’ve seen what the daleks bring up in him and knowing that he reversed his earlier policy on genocide in order to destroy the daleks makes it depressingly credible that he wants to torch this one. For my money, this is the best use they ever made of the Time War storyline; you can see him begin to recognize his kinship with the last of the daleks even as they continue to revolt him, and as the episode goes on you can see that even when he’s telling Van Staten about the daleks there’s this odd mixture of homesickness and loathing, as if finding his old arch-enemy is comforting and the dalek is in an odd way company for him. 

Second, though…boy does going back to this episode show you what a hash “Day of the Doctor” makes out of the whole Time War backstory. Then again, in Moffat’s defense, it was kind of a hash by the time he got to it. Because the real problem with the Time War backstory is that after Eccleston quits, the show keeps trying to forget Nine.

From “Dalek,” it seems pretty clear that from Nine’s perspective the point of the Time War was to destroy the daleks, and that Gallifrey was sacrificed to make that happen. We see in “Dalek” that the Doctor’s well-founded faith in the daleks’ destructive capacities makes him willing to sacrifice nearly anything—including Rose—to contain the dalek threat. For the viewers, his unwilling sacrifice of Rose restages his unwilling sacrifice of Gallifrey, and it helps the viewers make some emotional sense of a character who for 900 years has been driven by a desire to help people blowing up his own planet to save the universe from this menace. When the daleks show up again in “Bad Wolf,” he’s still pretty focused on wiping them all out at any cost (he won’t negotiate even for Rose’s safety) and in “The Parting of the Ways” he tells Jack and Rose that “my people were destroyed but they took the daleks with them,” which makes it sound as if all of Gallifrey was in on this and they all made the sacrifice together. “I always thought it was worth it,” he says. “Now it turns out they died for nothing.”

Somehow, over the course of the next three and a half seasons, that version of the Time War mutates into what we get at “The End of Time,” in which we discover that from Ten’s point of view, the point of destroying Gallifrey was to stop the Time Lords from doing some kind of reality-destroying move that would threaten the entire universe. I’ve never understood why Davies went there.It makes the destruction of Gallifrey something the Doctor actively intends and desires rather than something that he does against his will, and that makes the character much more culpable and, to my mind, really kind of insane. But then I’ve [always](http://plaidadder.tumblr.com/post/61744770006/plaidder-objects-to-journeys-end-a)[ objected](http://plaidadder.tumblr.com/post/64001246999/double-trouble-the-death-of-doctordonna) to the [end](http://plaidadder.tumblr.com/post/63416058935/4-episodes-into-season-5-plaidder-is-driven-to) of [season](http://plaidadder.tumblr.com/post/61308776176/and-now-i-will-respond-to-journeys-end-in-words) [four](http://plaidadder.tumblr.com/post/61620488905/the-end-of-time), so I won’t keep going on about that.

Anyway. My point is that Nine figures out that blowing up Gallifrey was a mistake  _at the end of season one,_ because it didn’t accomplish what he meant it to accomplish (viz., the end of the daleks). Maybe introducing the other motivation in “End of Time” was an attempt to keep the ambivalence alive; otherwise the only arc we have there is the Doctor getting more and more sad about the fact that the death of his planet was “all for nothing.” If the universe-killing threat is the Time Lords themselves, then Ten doesn’t have to confront the possibility that his Terrible Sacrifice was totally futile. The replacement of Nine’s motivation with Ten’s motivation also helps sustain the weird amnesia that everyone involved in the show seems to have regarding Season One. You do occasionally get Ten and  Eleven referring to things that Nine did. But from the show’s current publicity you’d never know Eccleston was ever on it, and by essentially rewriting the Doctor’s reasons for torching Gallifrey they submerge the show’s memories of Nine even further.

So we already have two conflicting stories about why Gallifrey burned in play three years before we get to “Day of the Doctor.” And Moffat certainly makes the continuity mess worse. For instance, Nine is clearly haunted by his memories of  _watching_  Gallifrey burn. He doesn’t just not remember the Day of the Doctor solution; he remembers something which we’re now supposed to believe never happened. Or happened once and then un-happened. It’s not entirely clear. But the thing that bugs me most about “Day of the Doctor” itself is the fact that when Ten and Eleven return to the Moment with the War Doctor, they’re both ready to push the button all over again until Clara cries them out of it. Even within the episode itself that makes no sense, given that Ten and Eleven have made a huge production out of telling Kate not to commit a similar act by admitting that what they did was “wrong.” But if you actually remember Nine, it makes even less sense. Nine already  _knows_ it was the wrong decision. Presumably Ten and Eleven ought to remember that too. But from that scene with the button it looks as if they’ve forgotten their lives as Nine, just as they’ve apparently forgotten what they told Kate five minutes earlier.

Their ultimate decision to save Gallifrey from the daleks, on the other hand, makes mincemeat out of Ten’s alternative motivation as revealed in “The End of Time.” If the Time Lords have really gone so bad that they can’t coexist with the universe—if they’re as bad as or worse than the daleks—if Ten actually DIED in the attempt to keep them from returning—what the hell sense does it make that either he or Eleven wants to preserve the Time Lords at the height of their world-destroying hubris? As a matter of fact—since Gallifrey was not actually destroyed—how did “The End Of Time” ever even happen?

Anyway. I wish the show remembered Nine better. Rewatching “Dalek” reminded me of why I liked Nine so much and what a loss it was when Eccleston left the show. I still think of four as my favorite season (until “Journey’s End”) because a) Donna Noble and b) the actual episodes are better-conceived and better written.  But after that, Season One, just because of Nine.


End file.
